Pump up the gangsta rap and level the 9s. It’s time for an intellectual drive-by:

Cindy: Shut the fuck up. Social change won’t be made in an airconditioned trailer supplied by a wealthy corporation.David Duke: I thought you were dead. Too bad I was wrong.Al Sharpton: You are truly a funny man. Give up politics and take up stand up comedy. We need someone to fill Chappell’s shoes.Pat Robertson: You blamed 9-11 on gay rights in America. No, I haven‘t forgotten that. As far as I’m concerned, you are to Christianity what Noam Chomsky is to Judaism.Hugo Chavez: Just when one Fidel is knocking on the door to Hell, another one pops up. Smile and stand still on the balcony you bastard.Jesse Jackson: The wrong man died in Memphis on April 4, 1968 – and deep down you know that.Louisiana & Mississippi - Help is on the way.

Powerline nails the bias in an AP story which quotes Chuck Hagel (R-France) comparing Iraq to Vietnam. I read the same AP story minutes after it was posted yesterday and wondered the same thing: What planet is Chuck Hagel a “leading Republican Senator” on? Surely not this one.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that for the Associated Press, any Republican who attacks the Bush administration and claims that we’re losing in Iraq is automatically promoted to “leading Republican senator” status.

And Hagel has less of a chance of nabbing the Republican Presidential Candidacy than Howard Dean.
I don’t know what Douglass Daniel was smoking, but if I was a cop I’d pull his butt over and search his car.

Just a note that I read Phyllis Chesler’s The New Anti-Semitism today. In the book she divides anti-semitism into two parts: the “Old” anti-Semitism which culminated in the systematic slaugher of 6 million people, and the “New” anti-Semitism which seeks to make Israel and Jews into modern day pariahs.

What struck me at the end of the book was this realization:
There is no real division between the two – and I believe that this was Chesler’s intention. The “New” anti-Semitism is just the “Old” anti-Semitism in a modern wrapper.

She cites relatively intelligent people stating the most heinous “facts” and “opinions” about Jews that my ancestors in the Pale heard 150 years ago. These people consider themselves modern, yet make no attempt to fight their prejudice against Jews.

It’s stunning – and scary. People like to think that they are so much more advanced than their predecessors – yet they carry the same fears, biases and hatreds that their predecessors held.

I love mysteries. While I don’t read much fiction, I am a huge fan of the British Detective genre that includes Sherlock Holmes, Inspector Morse, and A Touch of Frost. Mysteries are a kind of junk candy for the insatiably curious; they are intellectual challenges in which one only succeeds by failing – stories are considered “good” only if one fails to predict the ending.

Consequently I have always been interested in real-life mysteries – like what happened to Amelia Earhardt, The Marie Celeste, and Jimmy Hoffa. The demise of Judge Crater was once on that list, but apparently isn’t anymore.

However, there is another mystery of more recent vintage that hasn’t been solved. Two years ago a pizza delivery man robbed a bank and was captured wearing a bomb locked around his neck. 40 minutes later, it exploded and killed him. There have been no clues since. Pizza Man’s Public Death Still Unsolved

Will we have to wait 70 years for the solving of this mystery? Care to speculate? Or do you have an interesting unsolved mystery you would like to share?

UPDATE: The second mystery was officially solved in February 2007 when the feds announced that the victim was actually in on the plan with his girlfriend at the time, Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong.

It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic “welcome” to Ambassador Bolton than the one that confronted him at the United Nations this week. The man who rose to political and policy fame by leading the effort to repeal the U.N. resolution equating Zionism and racism was met upon his return to Turtle Bay by the disclosure, pressed by an enterprising American Jewish Congress, that the world body has been siphoning the taxpayers’ money into funding Palestinian Arab propaganda designed, in connection with Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, to incite Palestinian ambitions to go on to take Jerusalem.

Yogi Berra might have called it deja vu all over again, but it certainly is an example of where experience counts. The anti-Israel propaganda – which included a banner bearing the slogan “Today Gaza, Tomorrow the West Bank and Jerusalem” – was underwritten by the United Nations Development Program,* which has been headed in recent years by Mark Malloch Brown, who is now chief of staff to Secretary-General Annan.

When Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by police on July 22, civil libertarians in the UK as well as many elements of the Left cited this action as an example of police overreaction to the events of 7/7 and 7/21. Many on the Right – including myself – believed that the police had acted properly according to the reports coming out of the British media.

Well, it turns out that they didn’t. The police lied. Menezes wasn’t wearing a heavy coat, jumping turnstiles and running from police. He was wearing a light jean jacket and following police instructions. The official report hasn’t been issued yet, but it appears that Menezes may have been gunned down in what I can only describe as cold blood.

In general I trust the police. I believe they have a tough job and would really prefer not hassling people. I believe that cops should always be given the benefit of the doubt in highly publicized cases. Why? Because they have no axe to grind. They have no political agenda to feed or organization to build. I’ve known cops. One of my gradeschool friends is a sheriff now – which I find amusing considering how many times he had run-ins with the law as a teenager. They are people, and they make mistakes.

However they are trained not to make the mistakes made by the London cops on July 22. This was no mistake – no toy gun mistaken for a pistol in a dark alley.

What happened? What was the shooter thinking? Would American cops have made similar mistakes?

There are times when cops screw up badly, and when the do, no excuses should be made. If this is such a time, then there is nothing that can be said for this mistake, no support we can offer. John Gibson seems to agree.

The Left will no doubt interpret this as the Right being silent on the matter, but what should we do? What needs to be done that isn’t being done? The police lied, and now we are finding out the truth. We will learn why the shooter acted, and if he did shoot Menezes down in cold blood than there are institutions and laws in place that will mete out justice.

The Left cannot deny that fifty+ people died on 7/7 and that two weeks later a group of individuals were attempting to repeat the atrocity. There are suicide bombers around, and the only way to stop them is to shoot them dead so that they don’t detonate their explosives and kill everyone within a 20 meter radius.

Shooting Menezes may have a chilling effect on police activity in the UK, but honestly, maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe they need retraining considering how they slaughtered an innocent man and then lied about it. That doesn’t help stop terror.

I’m not sure what else you can call this, except for maybe Countercolumn chopping off her head and handing it to her on a silver platter.

You raised the specific instance of SFC Paul Ray Smith, who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for an action in which he lost his life—and of course, blame the President for your failure to get the story.

But the record shows that in February 2004, just about everyone on the planet had the story. Except the New York Times. Hell, even the Australian media picked it up.

Now, granted, your staff is operating at a significant handicap: Apparently, you have entire editorial units, entire copy desks, and fact checkers who don’t even know what a Congressional Medal of Honor is.

Owooch…

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I haven’t written much about Cindy Sheehan, mainly because so many others have and given the slow news cycle we’re in most people aren’t paying much attention anyway. However, Dean Esmay recently noted that David Duke has set up shop outside of Bush’s ranch in Crawford. This isn’t much of a surprise to those of us who have tracked the course of the White Supremacist movement in the United States. For over a decade the movement has sought to work with Islamic terror groups since both have an enemy in common: Us – as in you and me or anyone who thinks black women are beautiful, have gay friends and enjoy Japanese culture – or are Catholic, Jewish, Hindu or Asian, or maybe just prefer to be left alone.

If you made a Venn diagram of the people the White Supremacist hated and those the Islamic fundies hate you would find that they shared a large common area. More interesting perhaps is what happens when you overlay a circle showing what the anti-American Left hates and you will find a significant overlap on the following groups:

1. Jews – All three groups are anti-Semitic although the anti-War Left will attempt to couch their bigotry in terms of being anti-Israeli NOT anti-Jewish. However the anti-American Left opposes American goverment support of Israel and persues policies that undermine the very existence of the Israeli state. Others, like Cindy Sheehan’s cohort Lynne Stewart, have actively supported terrorists bent on exterminating Jews and Americans.

2. The American Government – All three view this entity as a single “being” with a single “mind” – i.e. “ZOG” (Zionist Occupied Gov’t in White Supremacist parlance). Islamic groups view the legitimacy of this government as an affront to their religion, since the gov’t is a secular institution without a foundation in the Koran. And the anti-war Left takes the Chomskyite view that this gov’t is the source of all evils in the world.

3. Democracy – The anti-war Left is elitist. In its eyes the vast majority of Americans are “sheeple” incapable of taking care of themselves and do not know what is best for them. Worse, when they do know what is best, they put their selfish interests ahead of the group’s. White Supremacists view Democracy as the root of the mongrelization of the races, and the Islamic Fundies view this type of government as an affront to the supremacy of Allah and Islamic law.

4. Catholics – Papists beholden to a foreign power / Unbelievers / Reactionary forces. You decide which of these three groups believes what about Catholics.

5. Women – Under Islam and White Supremacy, women are subservient to men. Under Leftist dogma, women are victims and can only be empowered after male-dominated society is overthrown. Until that happens, they must be “taken care of” by the Enlightened Elites who know what is best for them.

6. Rationalists/ free-thinkers / intellectuals – All three groups view this type of person as threats to their accepted dogmas. Any questioning is cause for “re-education”. Horowitz writes about the growing corraboration of the Leftists with Islamic Fundamentalists. Perhaps Horowitz should expand this book to include the White Supremacist movements.

Together all three groups create a noxious concoction that is guaranteed to make the coming years eventful and most likely, extremely dangerous.

In 1994-95 I spent a year living in the Bush on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Since that time I have often recommended that if you are offered the opportunity to visit East Africa, don’t think – just go. The reason is you will always find perfectly reasonable and rational reasons not to go, and talking yourself out of such a trip is a mistake.

Tanzania – and Kenya to a much lesser degree – is one of the true treasures of the world. In a country the size of France you will find hospitality that rivals that of the American South, a land teeming with truly wild animals of all sizes and shapes, and birds so beautiful that it almost hurts your eyes to see them.

Tanzania is one of the poorest countries on Earth and overcoming Western Guilt is a challenge, but doing so frees you to experience one of the sweetest and most vibrant cultures on the planet.

I mention this because The Wife was just presented with an opportunity to go back to Tanzania for 2 weeks this autumn, and even though I have serious, rational concerns (the trip will cost $3000 and where that money will come from I have no idea) I immediately offered my support for the trip. She will be visiting a rural clinic and one of the country’s largest hospitals, and Tanzania is one of the reasons why she went to med school.

It has been 10 years since I was there, and I have spent much of that time holding back my feelings and memories about that place since most people don’t want to hear my stories. Consequently it’s hard to feel the rush I once felt whenever I thought about Tanzania, but deep down it’s still there.

The family watched Constantine tonight. The Kid was disappointed that there wasn’t much killing or gratuitous violence. The Wife and I were pleasantly surprised. Granted, Keanu Reeves was doing his best Dirty Harry impersonation, but overall the story was quite entertaining – and the Wife and I are suckers for religious movies, especially when the Devil makes an appearance.

Over the past several years I’ve noticed that commentators on the Right are more concerned about true equality (of opportunity), protecting Gays (from being hung), and Women’s Choice (to stay at home or work) than the Left.

The Left has gone beyond embarrassment. Anyone who calls himself “Left-wing” or a “liberal” might want to bite his tongue when he identifies himself with Carter, Dean, Moore and the Moonbats who call Michelle Malkin names from their email accounts at work.

Check out this link at Exit Zero to see the Left called on the carpet for their racism and sexism:

The reactionary Left’s demand that conservative women stifle themselves is especially vituperative when directed towards Michelle Malkin. Just do a search for her name combined with any misogynistic slur. Not coincidentally , the sites that Mithras calls “funny” pop up every time.

An unofficial rule of political correctness – ethnic/misogynistic slurs can be used by the Left to denigrate someone that they define as “racist” or Republican. They’re okay with calling Condoleeza Rice an “Aunt Jemima” and Colin Powell an Uncle Tom, because as Republicans, they deserve it. Just like America deserved the ‘blowback’ of 9/11.

Are you willing to stand with bigots like this? Don’t you think it’s about time that you reconsidered your allegiance?